Yes, they have to run hot, but that's what insulation is for (and the waste heat from the battery helps maintain temperature). And yes, there is "limited lifespan", but only in regards to the fact that *everything* has limited lifespan. Sodium sulfur batteries last decades with no more maintenance than periodic inspection, and that's good enough.
The issue with diesel backup generators is that you have to pay full price for the generator hardware even though it sits idle most of the time, and when they do run, they burn diesel, which is rather expensive as far as fuels go. This battery can be used for not just maintaining power during line downtime, but also day-night load balancing. And it should have way less maintenance and greater reliability than a diesel generator.
How does "the two years its going to take them to put in the new power line" affect whether the battery is cost-effective? Sodium sulfur batteries should last for decades. They're just bringing *even more* power to the town with an additional line.
What they're doing with this battery is like what they did with the Castle Valley vanadium redox battery. One of the Rattlesnake lines was nearing its capacity limit during the day, increasing the risk of brownouts and forcing them to turn down requests for new customer service. But while a residential line may be full during the day, it's generally rather unloaded in the evenings. So by putting in the flow battery, they were able to charge it at night and then provide extra power for remote customers during the day.
You do realize that Presidio, TX is far inland mountainous desert, right? And you're worried about floods?
Even if that wasn't the case, there are far bigger things to worry about. Yes, sodium explodes in contact with water. But these are *sealed tanks*. Want to know the sort of stuff that exists in sealed tanks in places like New Orleans? The gulf coast is the core of the US's chemical industry! Want, say, a hydrofluoric acid leak? I'd *much* prefer a sodium explosion!
Even with wind, ice and snow would make maintaining them a pain.
Yet switching is exactly what they're doing. (at least on the other pole) Getting diesel to remote locations is really expensive; it's already expensive enough to begin with compared to other sources of electricity.
The gunship here is literally at least a mile away from the targets; look at how long it is between when fire retorts and impacts. RPGs have an effective range of, what, 200-300m? They self detonate at, what, ~900m or so? And AK-47s, at a mile range+ range? Give me a break. These people posed ZERO threat to that gunship and they knew it. Otherwise, they'd be a heck of a lot less relaxed about calling in the weapons that they saw.
Furthermore, the gunners didn't just hit the people who were suspected to be carrying guns. Or even try to. Big crowd of unarmed people visibly chatting with each other? A good enough cause to unload and then cheer at the aftermath like a series of frags in a video game, apparently. And a van of rescuers? Not only cause to disable the van, but to flatten it and everyone inside.
These are not proper rules of engagement. It shames our military to behave like this. We're supposed to be better than they are.
The unit cost of producing the chassis of a small car out of fiberglass and vinyl ester in moderate bulk is ~$3-$6k (as can be seen by the current fiberglass boat industry). Carbon fiber and epoxy I'm not as familiar with, but probably more like $6-12k in similar bulk (epoxy is ~2 1/2 times as expensive as VE, and carbon fiber should likewise vs. fiberglass -- but raw materials are only part of the total price).
F1 cars cost so much because they're produced in such low quantities, not because of the materials.
Foam-core composites really are the future of vehicles. They're ideal for vehicle construction in so many ways. They're naturally lightweight, yet yield 5-10 times the structural strength per unit mass as steel. They don't irreversibly deform (trapping passengers inside, and requiring things like the jaws of life). In all but the most extreme circumstances, they bounce back. In the most extreme circumstances, they fracture or shatter (i.e., still not trapping you). They're naturally insulated, both for sound and thermally -- increasing ride comfort and reducing heating and cooling energy costs. They're transparent to radio waves, so you don't need external antennae for radio, cell, and sat signals. Probably the only notable disadvantage they have (apart from current high production costs) is that they're non-conductive, which is bad in regards to downed power lines or lightning (but A) such situations are extremely rare, and B) you can make the shell conductive by periodically embedding conductive fibers)
I sometimes have a bit of trouble separating the wheat from the chaff. For example, to find a file manager (I couldn't believe one wasn't included by default), I had to google it and discovered that a lot of people were using AndroZip -- a zip program -- as a file manager.
Anyone know of a good free program to get your phone's GPS coordinates remotely on request (i.e., if lost or stolen)?
Isn't it obvious? Why does a plant have to already be grown in a region in order to use it? The US uses vast amounts of rubber, almost none of it grown in the US.
If you insist on growing it domestically, spurges should grow superbly in Rajasthan (western India) outdoors, and do reasonably well in many other parts of the country. And that's just outdoors; since you only need tiny amounts of the compound for a huge effect, it could be grown with shelter anywhere in the country.
No, we have a huge geological record of how the planet has responded to various forcings in the past as well. And the models are based on First Principles and validated with historic data, and *do* function within their confidence interval.
To bring it back to warming: countless people online have bought into a lot of *really, really* dumb arguments being pushed by people like Monckton, Watts, and others. Let's just trot out a random one: the argument that "warming precedes CO2, so CO2 isn't the cause of warming". Even a most basic climatology education will tell you that what's being talked about here are Milankovitch cycles, which are a classic case of CO2 *amplifying* an external forcing on geological timescales (the calculated Milankovitch orbital forcings are far too small to explain the existing warming, but the warming is easily understood in the context of the orbital forcings plus the CO2 feedback induced by the orbital forcing -- the CO2 levels being readily measurable in ice core gas bubbles). But the people hearing these arguments don't have that background to know this. So they look at the graphs and think, "Aha! Those dumb scientists got it backwards!"
After seeing this happen about fifty times for completely different nonsense arguments, YES, I think it's about time people stop convincing themselves that they know more about the subject than the scientists in the field. There's a difference between explaining and convincing. No, you're not too dumb to have things explained to you. Yes, you don't have enough background on the subject to tell if someone is pulling your leg.
Do yourself a favor and look at a global temperature anomaly map. Here's January. Basically, the eastern US, northern Europe, and Siberia were cold. The other ~80% of Earth's land mass and most of the oceans were warm.
I think you know quite well that the poster wasn't referring to university communications departments putting out press releases or scientists speaking at conferences. They specifically gave an example of the David Suzuki Foundation. Which is itself small peanuts compared to, say, the Heritage Foundation.
Not their job? You don't seem to get it: if you don't present your evidence in a way that the layperson can grasp they will not support the policies you want to ameliorate/reverse climate change
No, you don't seem to get it. The public isn't even remotely qualified to assess the validity of claims that, say, how the Charney sensitivity will be affected by variations in gamma from coupled climate-carbon cycle models with differening geospatial and temporal resolution, or how the Solomon et al stratospheric water vapor rise ties in with methane atmospheric residency times. So if you have both the warmers and deniers dumb down their argument for public consumption, the public will go with whichever scientist did a better job of dumbing down their argument, even if the overwhelming portion of the people who actually do understand the science can tell that that one's "science" is pure hokum. And even worse, you'll have various groups with political agendas selectively reporting on the dumbed-down arguments of a particular side (Fox, MSNBC, email forwards, blogs, etc).
What you're asking them to do is like asking asking a third grader to pick a design for a particle collider based on dumbed-down descriptions by competing scientists -- or worse, a scientist and a non-scientist hired by an industry with a massive budget. And then having the third grader only hear one of their arguments. There's no way the audience in question can make a valid, informed decision on the topic because the amount of background required is too great.
To bring it back to warming: countless people online have bought into a lot of *really, really* dumb arguments being pushed by people like Monckton, Watts, and others. Let's just trot out a random one: the argument that "warming precedes CO2, so CO2 isn't the cause of warming". Even a most basic climatology education will tell you that what's being talked about here are Milankovitch cycles, which are a classic case of CO2 *amplifying* an external forcing on geological timescales (the calculated Milankovitch orbital forcings are far too small to explain the existing warming, but the warming is easily understood in the context of the orbital forcings plus the CO2 feedback induced by the orbital forcing -- the CO2 levels being readily measurable in ice core gas bubbles). But the people hearing these arguments don't have that background to know this. So they look at the graphs and think, "Aha! Those dumb scientists got it backwards!"
I know you don't want to accept this. But the reality is that unless you're willing to spend years learning about the subject, you are not qualified to assess the science. "Dumbed down" or not.
First of all, yes, scientists do have PR departments. They're often called "media relations" or something of the sort
You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.
So, as a scientist, where do I go to get my own Environmental Lobby Group? Is there a form you have to fill out? How does their funding compare to the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industries' lobby groups?
nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision.
That's not their job. If you want to *actually* have a solid grasp of climate science, you're going to need to spend years of study. There are tens of thousands of papers out there, and you need to have a good understanding of at least a fair chunk of them. It's an incredibly complex field. And some aspects of it are even more complex than others -- for example, most climatologists, despite years in college and decades in the field, would feel unfit to review a paper on dendrochronological climate reconstructions unless that was their speciality.
So unless you feel like putting forth that degree of effort, you will be a naive and easily manipulated reviewer of the evidence. Unless you want to be a naive and easily manipulated reviewer of the evidence, you need to rely on the general opinion of those who have studied the subject. And they're overwhelmingly on one side of the issue.
There's one more thing that I can't stress enough. There are literally *tens of thousands* of papers on the subject. The news media likes to sensationalize stories. So when someone comes out with a sensational paper (whether it's even passed peer review or not), they treat it like it's the be-all and end-all of climate science. It's not. It's a tiny fraction of the literature out there. Never forget that. The same thing applies to individual scientists.
Quite true. And I say this as someone who agrees with the ~97% of active, publishing climate scientists who accept global warming. You can't just point to something that matches one theory or another and say that it's caused by that theory. That's unscientific. That assumes that there can only be one cause for a given course of action. Another couple examples of it on the pro-warming side are Atlantic hurricanes and the Kilimanjaro glaciers. A good example on the denier side is all of the people trying to argue that a cold, snowy winter in the US means that global warming is fake -- as though US = World and "1 year's weather" = Climate. Just like weather provides a huge amount of noise atop the climate signal (in this case, due to a record North Atlantic Oscillation), sandbars form and get erased on their own. No sea level rise required.
Sea level rise is primarily a long-term threat, and primarily when compounded with storms (rather than on its own). It starts out slow but accelerates significantly over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you serious? Every household should have one of these around!
Wake me up when floods in Las Vegas start covering mountains.
Here's what the terrain around Presidio looks like. It'd take a Noachian flood to cover the tops of those bluffs.
Are you kidding? It'll keep them away away from the waves/radiation/zombies/whatnot. It's brilliant!
They won't come close to matching Earth's rotation, so I don't see a point to dragging out the length of night and thus requiring larger batteries.
Yes, they have to run hot, but that's what insulation is for (and the waste heat from the battery helps maintain temperature). And yes, there is "limited lifespan", but only in regards to the fact that *everything* has limited lifespan. Sodium sulfur batteries last decades with no more maintenance than periodic inspection, and that's good enough.
The issue with diesel backup generators is that you have to pay full price for the generator hardware even though it sits idle most of the time, and when they do run, they burn diesel, which is rather expensive as far as fuels go. This battery can be used for not just maintaining power during line downtime, but also day-night load balancing. And it should have way less maintenance and greater reliability than a diesel generator.
How does "the two years its going to take them to put in the new power line" affect whether the battery is cost-effective? Sodium sulfur batteries should last for decades. They're just bringing *even more* power to the town with an additional line.
What they're doing with this battery is like what they did with the Castle Valley vanadium redox battery. One of the Rattlesnake lines was nearing its capacity limit during the day, increasing the risk of brownouts and forcing them to turn down requests for new customer service. But while a residential line may be full during the day, it's generally rather unloaded in the evenings. So by putting in the flow battery, they were able to charge it at night and then provide extra power for remote customers during the day.
You do realize that Presidio, TX is far inland mountainous desert, right? And you're worried about floods?
Even if that wasn't the case, there are far bigger things to worry about. Yes, sodium explodes in contact with water. But these are *sealed tanks*. Want to know the sort of stuff that exists in sealed tanks in places like New Orleans? The gulf coast is the core of the US's chemical industry! Want, say, a hydrofluoric acid leak? I'd *much* prefer a sodium explosion!
Even with wind, ice and snow would make maintaining them a pain.
Yet switching is exactly what they're doing. (at least on the other pole) Getting diesel to remote locations is really expensive; it's already expensive enough to begin with compared to other sources of electricity.
Here's a webcam.
Are they in the dictionary?
No?
Then they don't count, as always.
That's funny. I named mine my son "Robert');DROP TABLE STUDENTS;--"
The gunship here is literally at least a mile away from the targets; look at how long it is between when fire retorts and impacts. RPGs have an effective range of, what, 200-300m? They self detonate at, what, ~900m or so? And AK-47s, at a mile range+ range? Give me a break. These people posed ZERO threat to that gunship and they knew it. Otherwise, they'd be a heck of a lot less relaxed about calling in the weapons that they saw.
Furthermore, the gunners didn't just hit the people who were suspected to be carrying guns. Or even try to. Big crowd of unarmed people visibly chatting with each other? A good enough cause to unload and then cheer at the aftermath like a series of frags in a video game, apparently. And a van of rescuers? Not only cause to disable the van, but to flatten it and everyone inside.
These are not proper rules of engagement. It shames our military to behave like this. We're supposed to be better than they are.
The unit cost of producing the chassis of a small car out of fiberglass and vinyl ester in moderate bulk is ~$3-$6k (as can be seen by the current fiberglass boat industry). Carbon fiber and epoxy I'm not as familiar with, but probably more like $6-12k in similar bulk (epoxy is ~2 1/2 times as expensive as VE, and carbon fiber should likewise vs. fiberglass -- but raw materials are only part of the total price).
F1 cars cost so much because they're produced in such low quantities, not because of the materials.
Foam-core composites really are the future of vehicles. They're ideal for vehicle construction in so many ways. They're naturally lightweight, yet yield 5-10 times the structural strength per unit mass as steel. They don't irreversibly deform (trapping passengers inside, and requiring things like the jaws of life). In all but the most extreme circumstances, they bounce back. In the most extreme circumstances, they fracture or shatter (i.e., still not trapping you). They're naturally insulated, both for sound and thermally -- increasing ride comfort and reducing heating and cooling energy costs. They're transparent to radio waves, so you don't need external antennae for radio, cell, and sat signals. Probably the only notable disadvantage they have (apart from current high production costs) is that they're non-conductive, which is bad in regards to downed power lines or lightning (but A) such situations are extremely rare, and B) you can make the shell conductive by periodically embedding conductive fibers)
Actually, it's more like, "Light, Strong, Cheap, Meeting Current Style Trends, Fits Into Our Existing Production Infrastructure" -- Pick any four.
I sometimes have a bit of trouble separating the wheat from the chaff. For example, to find a file manager (I couldn't believe one wasn't included by default), I had to google it and discovered that a lot of people were using AndroZip -- a zip program -- as a file manager.
Anyone know of a good free program to get your phone's GPS coordinates remotely on request (i.e., if lost or stolen)?
Isn't it obvious? Why does a plant have to already be grown in a region in order to use it? The US uses vast amounts of rubber, almost none of it grown in the US.
If you insist on growing it domestically, spurges should grow superbly in Rajasthan (western India) outdoors, and do reasonably well in many other parts of the country. And that's just outdoors; since you only need tiny amounts of the compound for a huge effect, it could be grown with shelter anywhere in the country.
No, we have a huge geological record of how the planet has responded to various forcings in the past as well. And the models are based on First Principles and validated with historic data, and *do* function within their confidence interval.
And by your arguement, the past 40 years of warming also doesn't equal radical climate shift.
One year is not statistically significant. You need about 10-15 years minimum. Any statistical analysis of the data will tell you as much.
I'll direct you back to an earlier statement:
To bring it back to warming: countless people online have bought into a lot of *really, really* dumb arguments being pushed by people like Monckton, Watts, and others. Let's just trot out a random one: the argument that "warming precedes CO2, so CO2 isn't the cause of warming". Even a most basic climatology education will tell you that what's being talked about here are Milankovitch cycles, which are a classic case of CO2 *amplifying* an external forcing on geological timescales (the calculated Milankovitch orbital forcings are far too small to explain the existing warming, but the warming is easily understood in the context of the orbital forcings plus the CO2 feedback induced by the orbital forcing -- the CO2 levels being readily measurable in ice core gas bubbles). But the people hearing these arguments don't have that background to know this. So they look at the graphs and think, "Aha! Those dumb scientists got it backwards!"
After seeing this happen about fifty times for completely different nonsense arguments, YES, I think it's about time people stop convincing themselves that they know more about the subject than the scientists in the field. There's a difference between explaining and convincing. No, you're not too dumb to have things explained to you. Yes, you don't have enough background on the subject to tell if someone is pulling your leg.
Do yourself a favor and look at a global temperature anomaly map. Here's January. Basically, the eastern US, northern Europe, and Siberia were cold. The other ~80% of Earth's land mass and most of the oceans were warm.
I think you know quite well that the poster wasn't referring to university communications departments putting out press releases or scientists speaking at conferences. They specifically gave an example of the David Suzuki Foundation. Which is itself small peanuts compared to, say, the Heritage Foundation.
Not their job? You don't seem to get it: if you don't present your evidence in a way that the layperson can grasp they will not support the policies you want to ameliorate/reverse climate change
No, you don't seem to get it. The public isn't even remotely qualified to assess the validity of claims that, say, how the Charney sensitivity will be affected by variations in gamma from coupled climate-carbon cycle models with differening geospatial and temporal resolution, or how the Solomon et al stratospheric water vapor rise ties in with methane atmospheric residency times. So if you have both the warmers and deniers dumb down their argument for public consumption, the public will go with whichever scientist did a better job of dumbing down their argument, even if the overwhelming portion of the people who actually do understand the science can tell that that one's "science" is pure hokum. And even worse, you'll have various groups with political agendas selectively reporting on the dumbed-down arguments of a particular side (Fox, MSNBC, email forwards, blogs, etc).
What you're asking them to do is like asking asking a third grader to pick a design for a particle collider based on dumbed-down descriptions by competing scientists -- or worse, a scientist and a non-scientist hired by an industry with a massive budget. And then having the third grader only hear one of their arguments. There's no way the audience in question can make a valid, informed decision on the topic because the amount of background required is too great.
To bring it back to warming: countless people online have bought into a lot of *really, really* dumb arguments being pushed by people like Monckton, Watts, and others. Let's just trot out a random one: the argument that "warming precedes CO2, so CO2 isn't the cause of warming". Even a most basic climatology education will tell you that what's being talked about here are Milankovitch cycles, which are a classic case of CO2 *amplifying* an external forcing on geological timescales (the calculated Milankovitch orbital forcings are far too small to explain the existing warming, but the warming is easily understood in the context of the orbital forcings plus the CO2 feedback induced by the orbital forcing -- the CO2 levels being readily measurable in ice core gas bubbles). But the people hearing these arguments don't have that background to know this. So they look at the graphs and think, "Aha! Those dumb scientists got it backwards!"
I know you don't want to accept this. But the reality is that unless you're willing to spend years learning about the subject, you are not qualified to assess the science. "Dumbed down" or not.
First of all, yes, scientists do have PR departments. They're often called "media relations" or something of the sort
You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.
They call them Environmental lobby groups.
So, as a scientist, where do I go to get my own Environmental Lobby Group? Is there a form you have to fill out? How does their funding compare to the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industries' lobby groups?
nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision.
That's not their job. If you want to *actually* have a solid grasp of climate science, you're going to need to spend years of study. There are tens of thousands of papers out there, and you need to have a good understanding of at least a fair chunk of them. It's an incredibly complex field. And some aspects of it are even more complex than others -- for example, most climatologists, despite years in college and decades in the field, would feel unfit to review a paper on dendrochronological climate reconstructions unless that was their speciality.
So unless you feel like putting forth that degree of effort, you will be a naive and easily manipulated reviewer of the evidence. Unless you want to be a naive and easily manipulated reviewer of the evidence, you need to rely on the general opinion of those who have studied the subject. And they're overwhelmingly on one side of the issue.
There's one more thing that I can't stress enough. There are literally *tens of thousands* of papers on the subject. The news media likes to sensationalize stories. So when someone comes out with a sensational paper (whether it's even passed peer review or not), they treat it like it's the be-all and end-all of climate science. It's not. It's a tiny fraction of the literature out there. Never forget that. The same thing applies to individual scientists.
Quite true. And I say this as someone who agrees with the ~97% of active, publishing climate scientists who accept global warming. You can't just point to something that matches one theory or another and say that it's caused by that theory. That's unscientific. That assumes that there can only be one cause for a given course of action. Another couple examples of it on the pro-warming side are Atlantic hurricanes and the Kilimanjaro glaciers. A good example on the denier side is all of the people trying to argue that a cold, snowy winter in the US means that global warming is fake -- as though US = World and "1 year's weather" = Climate. Just like weather provides a huge amount of noise atop the climate signal (in this case, due to a record North Atlantic Oscillation), sandbars form and get erased on their own. No sea level rise required.
Sea level rise is primarily a long-term threat, and primarily when compounded with storms (rather than on its own). It starts out slow but accelerates significantly over time.